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On Thursday Google announced the list of participants accepted for this year's [Google Summer of Code](https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/) and we are happy to report that 5 contributors have been accepted to work on various parts of the ScummVM project this summer. * Ankush Dutt will work on an automated system for packaging freeware games with ScummVM for various platforms. The project includes two main objectives: help create standalone game packages bundled with ScummVM, and implement a new mechanism to let users download and install freeware games directly from the ScummVM launcher. You can follow the progress for this task on [Ankush’s GSoC blog](https://blogs.scummvm.org/ankushdutt/). * Harishankar Kumar will work on improving Director 4 Compatibility. The goal is to reach full support for Total Distortion & The Journeyman Project. You can follow the progress for this task on [Harishankar’s GSoC blog](https://blogs.scummvm.org/hsk/). * Kartik Agarwala (aka hax0kartik) will work on porting the CRAB engine to ScummVM. The CRAB engine was developed by Pyrodactyl Games and was used in several of the games which the studio released, most notably [Unrest](https://www.mobygames.com/game/74307/unrest/), a story-driven adventure RPG set in ancient India. You can follow the progress for this task on [Kartik’s GSoC blog](https://blogs.scummvm.org/hax0kartik/). * Abhinav Chennubhotla (aka PhoenixFlame101) will work on a system for verifying game file integrity, validating their checksums against those present in a central database. It will also let users contribute the checksums of game files not on the database. You can follow the progress for this task on [Abhinav’s GSoC blog](https://blogs.scummvm.org/phoenixflame101/). * Wyatt Radkiewicz (aka eklipsed) will work on a smaller project to optimize color blending code for the AGS engine thus making games more smooth and run better, especially on lower-end systems. You can follow the progress for this task on [Wyatt’s GSoC blog](https://blogs.scummvm.org/eklipsed/). Please give them a warm welcome, and visit our [Discord server](https://discord.gg/4cDsMNtcpG) if you want to discuss those projects. After a four week Community Bounding period, the coding period will start on May 29 and you can expect regular updates on these projects on their respective blogs. The team is very excited about the upcoming weeks – and we hope you are as well. |
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| 20231214.content | ||
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The end of the year is almost upon us, along with a new release of ScummVM. So here's a quick update for one of the more ambitious sub-projects that has been percolating along in the background: Macromedia Director support! For those who aren't aware, Macromedia Director was a popular framework used for thousands of games, educational titles, catalogues, art pieces, and other multimedia works.
## New Games For Testing First off, the upcoming 2.8.0 release will have some new supported games, and we need your help testing them! * _Alice: An Interactive Museum_ * _Ape Odyssey_ * _Classical Cats_ * _Gadget: Invention, Travel and Adventure_ * _The Cute Machine_ * _The Dark Eye_ * _Wrath of the Gods_ You will need the data files from the games' original install media, and a [daily build](https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/#daily) of ScummVM. For Macintosh editions, you will need to run the disc images through [Dumper Companion](https://www.scummvm.org/dumper-companion) in order to extract a complete copy of the files. In the case of The Dark Eye, you will also need the files created by the installer. As always, if you run into issues, please let us know on the [issue tracker](https://bugs.scummvm.org/). If your favorite isn't in the supported list, don't despair! ScummVM can open Director titles from 1995 and earlier, so grab the latest [daily build](https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/#daily) and give it a try. Titles released after 1995 tend to use Director versions that aren't supported yet. If you get stuck, reach out on the [issue tracker](https://bugs.scummvm.org/) and we can try and help. If you've encountered a Director title that isn't recognized by ScummVM, that's great! Please let us know on the [issue tracker](https://bugs.scummvm.org/) so the title can be added to the detection list. ## Engine versions As of the time of writing, ScummVM can detect **1595** different titles based on Director, with the following counts by Director version: | D0 | D1 | D2 | D3 | D4 | D5 | D6 | D7 | D8 | D9 | D10 | D11 | |----|----|----|-----|-----|-----|-----|----|-----|----|-----|-----| | 12 | 1 | 14 | 288 | 602 | 262 | 194 | 97 | 138 | 31 | 36 | 4 | ScummVM 2.8.0 will be the first release to include preliminary support for the D5 version of Director! A lot of work has gone into overhauling the codebase to support multiple cast libraries, however there is still plenty of work to be done adding Lingo functions and Xtras. Adding support for a new Director version is a tricky process. First we need to check for any changes to the movie file format, then add in any new engine and Lingo features, and finally start working through issues in a bunch of candidate games. Because of the difficulty of keeping track of facts vs. assumptions, we only enable features for an engine version once they have been confirmed with testing. This is why D6 and higher games will not open at all, even if the code we have would somewhat work. Support for the D2, D3 and D4 versions of Director has steadily improved. We are building up a suite of unit tests, both for Lingo and for the various drawing modes in the renderer. Most of the remaining bugs are related to undefined or incidental behavior: consider how two types in Lingo are compared, or the precise order that events are processed in, or how functions respond when you pass them nonsense data? All of these things are relied upon by thousands of Director products! And ScummVM must support all of them as closely as possible. ## XLibs Macromedia provided a C API with Director, which proved to be very popular for adding new engine features. There are hundreds of XObject and Xtra libraries in circulation, and each has to be reverse engineered and added as code to ScummVM. As of the time of writing, we have added support for **63** of these libraries. A common use case is video; Director includes the ability to play back QuickTime videos as a sprite, but computers of the day would struggle with the added overhead of Director's renderer if the video resolution was larger than a postage stamp. To work around this, several XLibs exist to play back video as an accelerated overlay. Quite a few D3 and D4 titles are missing video playback due to this type of XLib, and we plan on creating a common method of supporting these. The good news is that most uncommon XLibs did only one or two things, and are pretty easy to add initial support for. Part of the XLib format is a list of docstrings explaining each of the functions; there is a script in `/devtools` which can turn these docstrings into stubbed C++ code, saving a lot of hassle. --- That's about it! We have some very dedicated volunteers scouring every corner of the globe for obscure Director titles and testing them; if that sounds like your bag, you can visit them in the #engine-director channel of the [ScummVM Discord](https://discord.gg/4cDsMNtcpG). Until next time! |
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| 20231230.content | ||
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We are proud to announce the last release of the year 2023. Please welcome ScummVM 2.8.0 – “Mysteries, Mammoths, and Muppets”.
## New games The team was quite busy working on new engines and enhancing existing ones. The list of supported games grew noticeably, and we now support these additions: * _Adibou 1_ * _Classical Cats_ * _The Dark Eye_ * _Dark Side_ * _Escape From Hell_ * _Gadget: Invention Travel and Adventure_ * _Gobliiins 5_ * _The Excavation of Hob's Barrow_ * _Kingdom: The Far Reaches_ * _Might and Magic Book One_ * _Muppet Treasure Island_ * _Nancy Drew: The Final Scene_ * _Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion_ * _Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill_ * _Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned for Danger_ * _Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower_ * _Primordia_ * _Reah: Face the Unknown_ * _Schizm: Mysterious Journey_ * _Shardlight_ * _Strangeland_ * _Syberia_ and _Syberia II_ (macOS versions only) * _Technobabylon_ * _The Vampire Diaries_ * _Whispers of a Machine_ * _Wrath of the Gods_ and four other Director titles. * 14 AGS titles by _Stranga_ and _Cloak and Dagger_ All together, we’ve introduced 50 new games and five new engines. ## New platforms We are happy to see the RetroArch port being properly rewritten, and the port is now part of our source code. The Atari port has also been redone from scratch and now talks natively to the hardware, skipping SDL as an intermediate layer. That made many more games playable on the platform. The Atari FireBee port is still using the SDL library, though. ## Speed-optimized graphics Thanks to the work of one of the GSoC participants this year, Wyatt Radkiewicz (a.k.a. eklipsed), we now use CPU-specific SIMD instructions such as SSE, AVX2, and NEON for drawing graphics in the AGS engine and in some generic routines. This led to 4-14x speedup in drawing for many cases. ## Networking games This year, we merged with the [Backyard Sports Online](https://backyardsports.online/) project, which made it possible to play _Backyard Football_, _Backyard Baseball 2001_ and _Backyard Football 2002_ over the internet with other humans. Also, the _Moonbase Commander_ support is in active playtesting mode, though not yet ready for prime time. ## Notable engine enhancements The AGS engine has been brought up to version 3.6.0.53 from upstream. For many engines, we added support for numerous Chinese and Japanese game variants. Believe it or not, we implemented a lot of native GUI dialogs for SCUMM games, bringing them closer to the original experience. We also rewrote the sound code for the SCUMM Humongous Entertainment games, making them flawless. We performed a deep review of the _Broken Sword 1_ game engine, implementing some small, previously unnoticed things like scene transitions, in-game menu peculiarities, accurate fonts, idle animations, and more. Now, the game is absolutely faithful to the original. ---- The full [Release Notes](https://downloads.scummvm.org/frs/scummvm/2.8.0/ReleaseNotes.html) contain a comprehensive summary of the changes and enhancements; it is about 3 pages long with this release. On [our downloads page](https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/), you can find the downloads for various platforms. If you are using Windows, macOS, or either the Ubuntu Snap or Flatpack packages, the autoupdater will assist you in updating to ScummVM 2.8.0. Android port will follow up very shortly, as we are currently in the Open Beta phase. Play the games, and enjoy ScummVM! _Ah, one more thing…_ ScummVM is coming to [the Apple App Store for iPhones and iPads](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scummvm/id6446184412). Please leave us with good reviews and report any problems on our [Discord server](https://discord.gg/4cDsMNtcpG), which includes an [iOS support channel](https://discord.com/channels/581224060529148060/1149456560922316911). |
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